PERFORMANCE: “Speak the Unhearable”
June 11, 6 PM
Martin Wong, Stanton Near Forsyth Street, 1983, acrylic on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art; Steven Johnson and Walter Sudol; and James Keith Brown and Eric Diefenbach. 863.2011. © Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P·P·O·W, New York
Photo by Eva Geczy
Photo by Ang Zheng
Photo of Martin Wong, "Footprints Poems and Leaves", Printed Book, Second Edition 2024, Originally Published 1968.
“Speak the unhearable, and show the invisible.”
—Martin Wong
Responding to the work of Martin Wong, “Speak the Unhearable” is a queer-crip performance ritual by the echo-deviant poet Noa Micaela Fields and alphabet artist Nat Pyper engaging the limits of language at the edge of hearing.
From intentionally misspelled and distorted calligraphy-inspired texts to the American Sign Language fingerspelling scripts he painted above graffiti-covered buildings, Wong treated language as a mutable material across his varied practice—a trickster toeing the line between what is meant and what is understood. Taking these investigations as a point of departure, this performance gossips with ghosts and cruises language’s shifting embodiments. Like an ethereal game of telephone, Fields’s poems embrace the glitch of mishearing as a portal for transformation, remixing the mouthfeel of found language into her own captionless life. Access mischief ensues when Pyper selectively captions her poetry in the Martin Wong font from their archival typography project A Queer Year of Love Letters: Alphabets Against Erasure.
Meet us in the erogenous zone of the ears for an ill-advised séance of dead letters thrashing in crisscrossed miscommunication, replete with campy wearables, 8-ball fortune-telling, deaf clubbing, and other poetic misadventures.
Artist Bios
Noa Micaela Fields is an echodeviant enjambment queen—translation: trans poet with hearing aids. She is the author of E (Nightboat Books, 2026), an alter-book embracing mishearing as a technology of transformation. Among other places, her words have been published in Tripwire, Anomaly, Zoeglossia, Ghost City Press, Sixty Inches From Center, Antiphony, Foglifter and various zines. Beyond the page, her poems take on embodied form in ritual-performance remixes; such ethereal access mischief has transpired at Artists Space, Poetry Project, Elastic Arts, Beyond Baroque, Palais de Tokyo, No Nation, and elsewhere. Born in California, Fields lives in Chicago, where she curates readings at the Poetry Foundation and edits for Chrysalis, a literary magazine by and for trans youth.
Nat Pyper is an alphabet artist. Their practice of performance and publishing extends from ongoing research on countercultural queer histories. They’ve performed at Performance Space New York, Cooper Cole in Toronto, and PAGEANT in Brooklyn, and published with Are.na, Inga Books, GenderFail, Miniskirt, Source Type, and the Walker Art Center. Their book A Queer Year of Love Letters: Alphabets Against Erasure was published by Inventory Press and Library Stack in 2025. Their science fiction novella Zurdo..! was published by specific.place in 2026. They are based in South Brooklyn, NY.
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